Researchers Develop Online Game That Teaches Players How To Spread Misinformation

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Cambridge researchers have built an online game, simply titled Bad News, in which players compete to become "a disinformation and fake news tycoon." By shedding light on the shady practices, they hope the game will "vaccinate" the public, and make people immune to the spread of untruths. Players of the fake news game must amass virtual Twitter followers by distorting the truth, planting falsehoods, dividing the united, and deflecting attention when rumbled. All the while, they must maintain credibility in the eyes of their audience. The game distills the art of undermining the truth into six key strategies. Once a player has demonstrated a knack for each, they are rewarded with a badge. In one round, players can opt to impersonate the president of the United States and fire off a tweet from a fake account. It declares war on North Korea complete with a #KimJongDone hashtag. At every step, players are asked if they are happy with their actions or feel, perhaps, the twinge of shame, an emotion that leads to the swift reminder that "if you want to become a master of disinformation, you've got to lose the goody two-shoes attitude." The work is due to be published in the Journal of Risk Research.

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Re:... says guy with no evidence who writes fake n

[Maxo-Texas]

The story I was mentioning above.

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/1...

TBILISI, Georgia â" Jobless and with graduation looming, a computer science student at the premier university in the nation of Georgia decided early this year that money could be made from Americaâ(TM)s voracious appetite for passionately partisan political news. He set up a website, posted gushing stories about Hillary Clinton and waited for ad sales to soar.

âoeI donâ(TM)t know why, but it did not work,â said the student, Beqa Latsabidze, 22, who was savvy enough to change course when he realized what did drive traffic: laudatory stories about Donald J. Trump that mixed real â" and completely fake â" news in a stew of anti-Clinton fervor.

More than 6,000 miles away in Vancouver, a Canadian who runs a satirical website, John Egan, had made a similar observation. Mr. Eganâ(TM)s site, The Burrard Street Journal, offers sendups of the news, not fake news, and he is not trying to fool anyone. But he, too, discovered that writing about Mr. Trump was a âoegold mine.â His traffic soared and his work, notably a story that President Obama would move to Canada if Mr. Trump won, was plundered by Mr. Latsabidze and other internet entrepreneurs for their own websites.

âoeItâ(TM)s all Trump,â Mr. Egan said by telephone. âoePeople go nuts for it.â

If his pro-Clinton site had taken off, he said, he would have pressed on with that, but âoepeople did not engage,â so he focused on serving pro-Trump supporters instead. They, he quickly realized, were a far more receptive audience âoebecause they are angryâ and eager to read outrageous tales.

âoeFor me, this is all about income, nothing more,â he added.

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So yup, conservatives and republicans went crazy reading fake pro-trump, anti clinton stories written by this guy's staff of writers. Unlike the 13 Russians just indicted, Beqa didn't even care politically. He was just trying to drive ad hits.